La Luz on Sexist Comments: “We Don’t Care About Jerks”

Seattle surf rock quartet La Luz are halfway through a month-long tour of the states - their first outside the Pacific Northwest. It’s a pretty big undertaking and the gals have been rocking stages from Fort Worth, Texas, to New York City. Today, their new 7” Brainwash posted to the music blog Brooklyn Vegan and for some reason, the title track and “T.V. Dream” - two breezy, summer pop tunes - attracted the attention of some seriously sexist trolls. More accurately - and more pathetically - it was the band’s promo photo that incited such comments as, “yes, yes, no, yes.”

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We caught up with frontwoman Shana Cleveland, on the road with her band to Boston where they play tonight, to get her take. (By the way, studies have shown that by a.) not being a jerk, and b.) properly identifying band members as actual people with names, rates of internet stupidity go way, way down). La Luz play the Capitol Hill Block Party Saturday, July 27.

Did you guys see the comment thread on that Brooklyn Vegan post? I was just talking to Alice (Sandahl, keyboards) about that! It’s hard to know what to do. I don’t know, I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before, I think people are intimidated that we don’t need a man around. There’s this band Hot Fruit and they put up a pretty sexual video - it was this awesome, Olympia-feminist-weird-art thing and most of the comments were dudes talking about which ones they wanted to screw and I was so grossed out by that. This is this first time I’ve noticed that in a comment section about anything we’ve done.

What do you make of it? It’s pretty disgusting, but none of us take it personally. I think it’s really disturbing, and I think it really says something about our society - that there are people who think like that. That language is really violent, I mean, there are guys out there that see women and don’t think,“I’d like to screw that,” they’re thinking, “I can screw that.” It’s just ridiculous.

Are you down about it? No way, our tour’s been incredible. And we don’t care about jerks.